The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Andrea who was eight. She was sent to a convent boarding school in Sussex, seventy miles away. Called Mayfield, the convent was run by nuns who inspired her with a dislike of the Catholic Church. John paid her fees.

Una’s legacy of venereal disease depressed her. A succession of doctors failed to cure her. Dr May treated her by some kind of painting of the vaginal wall. He told her she ‘would always be sensitive’, but three years’ extreme care might make her ‘relatively sound’. ‘I think it so damnably hard on John and an uphill lookout!’ Una wrote. Cystitis and discharges figured more in her diary than the joys of desire. Dr Hathaway tried ‘electrical treatment’. Alfred Sachs gave her daily injections and vaccines and was forever taking swabs. It all reduced her to tears. ‘Oh John is good to me’, she wrote in May 1919. ‘Where would I be in this terrible trouble without her devotion and friendship?’

She resumed hypnosis with Crichton-Miller – once a week on a Monday. These sessions, the seances with Mrs Leonard, endless book tests, evidential proof of Ladye, venereal disease and the stress of separating from Troubridge took its toll. She became phobic and felt unreal. Crichton-Miller wanted her to have psychoanalysis as an inpatient at Bowden House.

John took her there by car at the end of May. Miller asked John not to visit for three weeks and to send only postcards not letters. John told Una she would communicate telepathically. She was writing a paper on this for the Society. And Ladye, she said, would knock on the clinic walls or shine lights in the night.

John disliked Una being controlled by a regime other than her own. Adrift without her, she walked the dogs in the moonlight and ‘longed for Squig to see it’. She wrote Squig’s diary entries, went alone to Mrs Leonard and suffered the separation. Una had become essential to her and her dependence was acute. Without her the paranormal lost its fascination. She sent peaches, carnations and roses. Una longed to be home. She called her routine ‘damned dull’ and said Miller ‘took loonies’ at Bowden House.

While Una was there her mother, Minna, rang John to say Troubridge had been knighted and Una was now ‘a Lady’. ‘Troubridge has had K added to his threadbare CMC’, John wrote in Una’s diary on 3 June. Una called it ‘a bore’ and affected not to care. But she readily dropped her more than threadbare Mrs, embellished the title and assiduously thereafter called herself Una, Lady Troubridge. Servants addressed her as such and it was printed on her visiting cards. She pulled rank though the honour came from a man she despised and whom she had left. If Mabel Batten was a spoof Ladye, she was the real thing. John, too, let the world know that she was partner to Lady Troubridge. It made her more of a Lord.

Una stayed three weeks at Bowden House. On the evening of 20 June she made a scene and demanded to see Miller. He went to her room at half past ten. She told him she had had enough and was leaving in the morning. He was emphatic that she should stay. He told her she needed intensive analysis. ‘He went at 11.30 very angry. So was I, but I concealed it which he did not.’

She was up at five-thirty next day ‘wildly excited’ about getting away. John arrived mid-morning. Una said goodbye to Crichton-Miller. He had, she said, ‘recovered outward control’. It was the end of the relationship. She did not want such insights as he perhaps might have helped her to find. He, like most of the living inhabitants of their former lives, was discarded. A wrangle over money marked the end of it. John and Una accused him of overcharging on his final account. ‘It is my misfortune and not my fault,’ he wrote, ‘that I have to justify my existence and provide for a wife and family on a time-basis. As I am not a surgeon who gets £1000 for an hour’s anatomical dissection, but only a person who tries to talk people well, my time has to be charged for, more or less … Suppose we split the thing and call it 12 guineas …’

At Chip Chase Una found everything divine. ‘Almost too good to be true that I’m home’, she wrote in her diary on 22 June. She did not want again to be parted from John, even for a day. Like Feda from the spirit world with ‘ostensible possession’, John was the air she breathed and where she lived.

12

A grossly immoral woman

Tongues wagged in the West End men’s clubs, the Travellers, the Beefsteak, the Garrick, where the armchairs were large and leather and the whisky flowed. News spread that Radclyffe Hall was a lesbian, a seducer of wives and addicted to sorcery.

Troubridge was in town in January 1920. St John Lane Fox-Pitt told him of the paper Radclyffe Hall had read to the Society for Psychical Research. Troubridge let him know how she had wrecked his private life, broken his home and seduced his wife, who had mental problems because of it all. Lady Troubridge said that ‘this spirit business was now her life’ and she no longer had concern for him or his occupation. Mabel Batten had been immoral too. She had given favours to numerous men before being lured from her husband by this lesbian.

Radclyffe Hall was recommended for membership of the Society’s council. Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick, Balfour’s sister, proposed her and a circular gave notice that her election would be on 20 January 1920. Fox-Pitt saw opportunity for reprisal. Troubridge had confirmed his suspicions. Radclyffe Hall was a pervert, a threat to decency and the Society’s name. He went to Isabel Newton, the Secretary, and declared:

Miss Radclyffe Hall is a grossly immoral woman. Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge has recently been home on leave, and has, in my presence, made very serious